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  • Narrative Healing in Betty Louise Bell’s Faces in the MoonA Tribute to Cherokee Continuance
  • Christina Roberts (bio)

Betty Louise Bell’s novel Faces in the Moon (1994) offers much more than an in-depth character analysis or a solipsistic focus on one individual’s angst with the world. Woven into the narration of the novel is an intergenerational story, a story that resonates beyond its pages and illustrates the importance of writing that Daniel Heath Justice points to in Our Fire Survives the Storm: A Cherokee Literary History: “To write about family and history is to try to give voice to silenced ghosts as much as to give strength to the living” (7). In giving voice to silenced ghosts, Faces in the Moon connects to a past marked by removal and allotment, and the novel’s intricate structure, character development, and shift s in viewpoint merge to tell a story that illustrates what Eduardo and Bonnie Duran term the “soul wound,” or a shared pain that has its origins in the colonization of North America, dishonored treaties, and centuries of injustice (24).1 At the same time, Bell’s novel gives strength to the living through its emphasis on the journey of a detribalized individual and the transformative power of story. In this essay I illustrate the careful ways in which Bell structures the narrative to focus attention on the legacies of colonization, but I argue that her ultimate act is one of creation. Bell unites the past with the present and in doing so creates a healing narrative that transforms a past marked by trauma and loss to reveal the ongoing resilience of Cherokee women.

Faces in the Moon is divided into five segments and includes numerous flashbacks, often in the form of italicized snippets of text. The brief novel opens with an unidentified narrator who declares: “I was raised on the voices of women. Indian women. The kitchen table was a place of remembering” (4). The novel’s first segment, “Raising Voices,” focuses on this unidentified narrator who connects with the main protagonist of the novel and carrier of family stories, Lucie Evers: [End Page 86]

And I know their stories have grounded my sympathies, speaking through my spirit without time or place or will, Momma, Auney, Lizzie: they come alone or together, sometimes carrying with them Uncle Jerry and Uncle Henry and Robert Henry. Sometimes, they simply stand in the mortal light of their beloved Hellen, Lizzie’s sister-in-law, Momma’s mother, my grandmother. But, always, their real companion is Lucie, the child who sat and listened and stared into their stories, the child whose place I have taken.

(5–6)

The unnamed narrator introduces Lucie, a character whose experiences, thoughts, and memories comprise the bulk of the novel. This initial narrator acknowledges that her family’s stories speak through her spirit, illustrating Justice’s point about the strength that is found in writing about family. Furthermore Bell draws a matrilineal connection to the past, calling attention to familial history and the important role of Cherokee women.

Marilou Awiakta’s Selu: Seeking the Corn-Mother’s Wisdom reveals how vitality is sustained through interconnectedness and focuses on the sacred roles that women play, themes that are at the core of Bell’s novel. Awiakta also states: “Not only are racism, sexism and distain for Mother Earth coming to harvest in the 1990s, they also seem to be reseeding themselves. Thoughts and energy to counter them are also coming to harvest and, hopefully, will reseed in an even stronger strain, so that the twenty-first century will begin a new era of peace and justice” (37–38). Awiakta complements her focus on seeding with an emphasis on round, double-woven baskets and the role of women as weavers, communicating how

women since the beginning of time have been “weavers,” weavers who work from a spiritual base. We know how to take diverse strands of life and spin them into a pattern. How to listen to the whole web at once and mend small tears that occur. If the web should be damaged beyond repair, women, like our sister the spider, know how to ingest...

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